General Development Archive

Using MUSCLE to Implement a Multiplayer Networked Game

Guest post by Jeremy Friesner 2002-08-12 General Development 8 Comments

Prologue by the editor-in-chief: "A bit more than two years ago, while I was still serving at BeNews, I asked Jeremy Friesner to write an article and present his cross-platform client-server messaging system for dynamic distributed applications, MUSCLE. Two weeks later, he came back to me with a multi-page article, explaining MUSCLE. To demonstrate the power of MUSCLE, Jeremy created a demo application based on it. The result was BeShare.

An Introduction of Modern Linux Distributed Filesystems

Eugenia Loli 2002-08-08 General Development 5 Comments

"The ability to share disks, directories, and files over a network is one of the most significant advances in modern computing, reducing local disk space requirements and making it easy for users to collaborate without ending up with hundreds of versions of the same files. Personal computers running Microsoft Windows and Apple's MacOS and Mac OS X inherently support sharing disks and directories with other systems of the same types. Linux and Unix systems traditionally use the NFS network filesystem in order to do the same sort of thing." Read the article at LinuxPlanet.

Borland Delivers Delphi 7 Studio

Eugenia Loli 2002-08-07 General Development 26 Comments

"Borland Software Corporation today announced Borland Delphi 7 Studio, featuring full support for new and emerging Web Services, integrated model driven development, and preview capabilities for the Microsoft .NET Framework. Using Delphi 7 Studio, the estimated one million Delphi developers can begin developing their skills for .NET and preparing applications for .NET without abandoning their existing work and skills on the Windows platform." Read the rest of the press release at Borland USA.

C# Input/Output Classes Simplified

Eugenia Loli 2002-08-06 General Development 4 Comments

"Beginners to the .NET Framework sometimes have a hard time trying to understand the classes in the System.IO namespace for performing input/output (IO) operations. The difficulty stems from the fact that this namespace is relatively large, containing more than 40 members, some of which are similar classes that can be used to achieve the same tasks. Thus it is sometimes hard to figure out which class is best for which task. This article tries to make your life a bit easier by grouping IO tasks into three categories and introducing the classes that are suitable for each task category." Read the developer's article at O'Reilly.

A Primer on Distributed Computing

Eugenia Loli 2002-08-02 General Development 4 Comments

Say you've got a big computation task to perform. Perhaps you have found a way to cure cancer, or you want to look for aliens. All you need is a few super computers to work out some calculations, but you've only got the one PC on your desk. What to do? A popular solution is the "distributed computing" model, where the task is split up into smaller chunks and performed by the many computers owned by the general public. This guide over at Kuro5hin shows you how.

Gcc 3.1.1 Released

Submitted by Nils O. Selåsdal 2002-07-27 General Development 21 Comments

GCC 3.1.1 has just been released. This release is a bug fix release relative to GCC 3.1. The next release of GCC will be GCC 3.2. This release will be available very soon (within days or a week). The only changes in GCC 3.2 relative to GCC 3.1.1 will be changes to the C++ ABI.

Borland Speeds Kylix C++ for Linux Development

Eugenia Loli 2002-07-23 General Development 21 Comments

Borland Software Corp is set to build on an early lead among Linux developers, with today's expected launch of a C++ rapid application development (RAD) environment. Scotts Valley, California-based Borland will announce version 3.0 of its Kylix RAD environment for C++. Previous versions of Kylix targeted Delphi programmers on Windows and Linux. Read the rest of the report at TheRegister.

Perl 5.8.0 Released

Eugenia Loli 2002-07-19 General Development 1 Comment

Perl 5.8.0 is a major new release of the Perl 5 language. It incorporates all development and maintenance changes since the last major release, 5.6.0, including all the changes of 5.6.1.

Building GUI Applications with Python

Submitted by Debinay 2002-07-19 General Development 11 Comments

"Developing the Graphical User Interface (GUI) for a Python application is often a tedious, time-consuming, and opaque process. This is the exact opposite of how Python programmers would describe most other aspects of software development using Python. So what is it about GUI applications that causes them to be so hard?" Read the technical article at OnLamp. Two more Python articles can be found at developerWorks at IBM, here and here.

Interview with Erik J. Barzeski of Cocoa Dev Central

Submitted by Jared White 2002-07-17 General Development 4 Comments

Jared White over at The Idea Basket has published an interview with Erik J. Barzeski, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Cocoa Dev Central. In the interview they discuss the history of the Cocoa programming environment, the importance of Cocoa vs. Carbon within the Mac development community, and how vital Cocoa is to Apple and the Mac platform.

Advanced Filesystem Implementor’s Guide, Part 11

Submitted by Debinay 2002-07-16 General Development 2 Comments

In this article, Daniel Robbins (President/CEO, Gentoo Technologies, Inc.) shows you how to use the latest filesystem technologies in Linux 2.4 and gives an update on the status of the XFS, ReiserFS, and ext3 filesystems. He shares implementation advice, performance information, important technical notes, as well as an outline of how these various filesystems will continue to improve over the next year. You can also view his previous article in this series, which shows you how to get XFS up and running.

Review of Unsanity’s MacOSX Haxies

Eugenia Loli 2002-07-04 General Development 8 Comments

Not everyone's happy with the default look and feel of MacOSX. So the Unsanity LLC guys have come to fullfil feature requests from many MacOSX users. They have written applications that are basically "hacks" (Unsanity prefers the word "haxies"), that they change MacOSX, sometimes in a pretty fundamental way. We tested three of their products, Fruitmenu, WindowShadeX and Xounds.

libferris Winds its Way Towards 1.0.0

Guest post by Ben Martin 2002-07-03 General Development 6 Comments

libferris is a virtual filesystem (VFS) that runs in the user address space. This means that applications using libferris will use the shared libraries API to access the filesystem which may then delegate to the kernel using libc to perform the desired actions. Operating in the user address space allows libferris to mount things that one would generally not want the kernel to mount. For example libferris mount Berkeley database files, ftp sites, XML files, rpm files, sockets, sysv IPC, mysql databases and remote computers using ssh as a filesystem.

Pepper 4.0.5 Released for FreeBSD and Linux

Submitted by Terminus 2002-07-02 General Development 51 Comments

Remember the Pepper competition on OSNews two months ago? This is a quick note to let you know that Pepper, the popular Windows/MacOS editor, is now available on FreeBSD and Linux (x86/PPC).

Proposal for the Development of a Web Services Application

Eugenia Loli 2002-06-25 General Development 68 Comments

If there was a single application making someone use MacOSX full time, that application would be Watson. This application is possibly the most awarded in the MacOSX world, and it is the best idea for an application that I saw the last few years. Despite the idea being dead simple, and even seem redundant at first, Watson is an excellent, original and handy tool. I would like to initiate an open source project for a multi-platform clone of Watson (Karelia say that they have no plans for any ports - with only a remote possibility for a Windows port). I will start by putting $100 USD on the table while readers are most welcome to co-sponsor the project as well. What we really need though, is willing and capable C++ developers.

Programming the Thread Pool in the .NET Framework

Eugenia Loli 2002-06-22 General Development 13 Comments

The article provides an in-depth look at the thread pool support in the Microsoft .NET Framework, shows why you need a pool and the implementation provided in .NET, and includes a complete reference for its use in your applications.

Overriding the GNU C Library

Submitted by Koki Zamboni 2002-06-14 General Development 11 Comments

What do you do if you don't have the source for your application and it's failing because a GNU Library for C (glibc) function is returning something bad to the application? Override the function of interest with your own version. This can be done without having root permissions and without recompiling the libc source. Imagine the thrill of writing your own version of open()! The article contains sample code.

Writing Your Own Toy OS, PART II

Submitted by Wezza 2002-06-08 General Development 16 Comments

"The next thing that any one should know after learning to make a boot sector and before switching to protected mode is, how to use the BIOS interrupts. BIOS interrupts are the low level routines provided by the BIOS to make the work of the Operating System creator easy. This part of the article would deal with BIOS interrupts." This is the second part of the series of articles on how to write your own toy OS.

The Technology Behind LynxOS v4.0’s Linux ABI Compatibility

Eugenia Loli 2002-06-05 General Development 2 Comments

"LynxOS v4.0, the newest release of the POSIX-conformant hard real-time operating system (RTOS), has support for Linux ABI compatibility -- where Linux application binaries can run unchanged in the LynxOS environment without necessitating source code recompilation. This white paper examines the issues surrounding ABI compatibility in general and describes the architecture of the Linux ABI compatibility layer on LynxOS v4.0." Read the article at LinuxDevices.

Rediscovering Object Orientation

Guest post by Nicholas Blachford 2002-05-28 General Development 15 Comments

"Does anyone really know what "object oriented" means? Does the phrase signify anything, or are the words just strung together because of an historical misnomer? One thing is clear. No one understands what the phrase "object oriented" means when they first hear it. While it does appear to be a juxtaposition of two ordinary words, its meaning does not jump out at you." Read it at CobolReport.